On the morning of 2 August 1990, hours after Iraqi troops crossed into Kuwait, John Kiriakou — then 25 years old and a year into the CIA’s Office of Leadership Analysis — was taken to the White House to brief the president.
He had arrived at the office about six in the morning. His boss told him as he walked in not to take his jacket off, because they were going to the White House. A car was waiting outside headquarters; a Marine met them at the West Wing entrance and escorted them to the Oval Office.[1] Kiriakou had seen the room only on television.[2]
The room
Present were President George H. W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, CIA Director William Webster, Kiriakou’s boss and Kiriakou. Protocol was that you do not speak unless spoken to and do not sit until the president sits, so he stood. Bush took an overstuffed chair, Quayle an identical one, Scowcroft and Webster two less comfortable dining chairs, and Kiriakou and his boss the couch.[2][3] The thought he remembers having, and remembers “like it was yesterday”, was that his friends from high school would not believe in a million years what he was doing.[3]
The briefing
The president said “gentlemen, please sit down”, looked around and asked: “well, now what do we do?” — and everyone turned to look at Kiriakou. He gave the facts: at 0200 hours Iraqi troops had crossed the border, they had occupied the entire country, and the royal family had fled to Saudi Arabia. Kiriakou’s assessment of the moment is blunt: “the president genuinely didn’t know what to do about this.”[4][5]
Asked next whether the agency knew anything about who was ruling Iraq that day, Kiriakou reached for a piece he had written about a Kuwaiti physician he found interesting: the son of a Sudanese slave of the Kuwaiti royal family, black and therefore a minority in Kuwait, given a scholarship to study medicine at the American University of Beirut, who came home a declared communist and a thorn in the royal family’s side — and whose medical school roommate had been a young Lebanese man named George Habash, with whom he founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.[6][7][8]
The president looked at him blankly; the vice president shouted “Jesus Christ.” Webster then stood and thanked everyone for coming — Kiriakou’s cue, as he puts it, to get out of the Oval Office.[8]
Afterwards
Kiriakou says he was on a cloud all day, and that nobody in the office cared: they had all briefed presidents and vice presidents, if perhaps not all in the same room at once. It was worth a pat on the back, nothing more.[9] At home his wife asked how work had been. Great. What did he do? “Nothing.” Talk to anybody interesting? “Nope. Just sat at the desk all day thinking the big thoughts.” Her reply — “I don’t know how you do a job so boring” — is how he ends the story.[10]
What his boss told him on the way out
In a later telling Kiriakou adds the exchange that followed the briefing, and treats it as the moment the scale of the thing was explained to him. His boss said he was not sure Kiriakou was appreciating the importance of what was happening, and then drew the distinction: “it’s not unusual for a country that we cover to go to war. It’s highly unusual for a country that we cover to go to war with us.”[11]
The same account fills in what the agency had said beforehand — “we predicted 30 days before that Saddam would invade Kuwait” — and names the man Iraq installed afterwards, whom Kiriakou identified to the room from a piece he had written: the Iraqi government had announced that morning that it had installed Ahmed al-Khatib “as the occupation governor of Kuwait.”[12][13]
He closes the episode with a call that came later the same afternoon: Margaret Thatcher telling George H. W. Bush “now’s not the time to go wobbly, George.”[11]